Chapter 1. Business Process Modeling – Bridging Business and Technology

"All business does IT" (Information Technology). This was a superlative but a futuristically interesting tweet I came across recently. The impact of information technology on business in recent years has been overwhelming. They are like two large galaxies in our universe, colliding and merging. The current state of this merger can be defined by one term - collaboration. Businesspeople collaborate with information technology (IT) people and use IT services to continuously improve and deliver commercially viable and profitable product/services to their customers.

Collaboration quintessentially needs effective communication, and Business Process Modeling smoothly fits into this scenario. Business process modeling is not new; business people have always used it. Models were developed in mind, and then, they were written down as text or depicted as diagrams. With IT embracing business, these models evolved into standard flow charts and activity diagrams. However, there was ambiguity; the diagrams and text provided by business as requirements were interpreted by the technical people and they had their own representation, architectural models, requirement documents, and design. This was duplication of effort and people, intensive, often with a line of meetings between business stakeholders and information technologists negotiating, and arriving at conclusions about the business requirements. This being the scenario, what improvement does business process modeling bring to the table? Business process modeling brings in the concept of a common artifact between business and information technologists.

Business models are prepared by business analysts and shared with technologists. They collaborate and improve on the model and arrive at an artifact that is executable. Further, technologists as always reduce their work by automating their involvement; that is, we are moving largely to software systems where business people can configure the business process and execute it without the intervention of an information technologist.

Concluding the philosophy, let us jump to the larger context of Business Process Management (BPM) and discuss it in detail. This chapter covers the following concepts:

• Business process management concepts
• The standard – business process model and notation (BPMN 2.0)
• Use cases of BPM as applied in the industry
• Design patterns in the BPM world
• A brief introduction to jBPM
• Business logic integration platform, the bigger picture